College Football

[Jungle Rat]

[eCat]

[Tree]

[media] [/media]

Carr Making the Hall of Fame is silly, and the Jets know it, but they also know if they don’t land him they’re in trouble. Rodgers is clearly not interested.

[Jungle Rat]

[hedge]

Sporticus, what??

[hedge]

"I have tweeted this out before, but the open letter that @McCannSportsLawwrote to Charlie Baker about the #NCAA last week was simply excellent. I strongly recommend everybody in t he college sports industry read it."

That article is interesting (and persuasive), but from a devil's advocate/Atlas Shrugged perspective, what if (and obviously this will never happen, but what if) all colleges collectively and simultaneously said "OK, you're right, why should universities be in the athletics business at all? Amateur or paid, that's not what we're here for. So we're going to disband every athletic program and get back to the job of education. Good luck to all you athletes who will never be able to attend a good college now (and maybe no college at all), it was fun but now it's over."

I get that the "student" athletes are an integral part of college athletics, but so are the coaches, facilities, ticket offices, parking attendants, and the dozens if not hundreds of other people and details that go into making the show happen. Obviously when it comes to pro sports, the athletes finally figured out that they were the show and so they played hardball and got a ton of the profits that the owners were just pocketing themselves, and good for them. But the pro's are a much smaller group and much more highly skilled, so they had the juice to get it done. Is anybody really going to care if they don't get to see, say, Leaky Black brick 3's for 5 years?

[hedge]

I did have a chuckle at the ostensible payoff line at the end of this...

"But you can turn the tide. Remember, you’re not a former athletic administrator or university president. You aren’t a product of a system that incentivizes caution, breeds bureaucracy and rewards process for the sake of process. You’re a former governor"

[innocentbystander]

but from a devil's advocate/Atlas Shrugged perspective, what if (and obviously this will never happen, but what if) all colleges collectively and simultaneously said "OK, you're right, why should universities be in the athletics business at all? Amateur or paid, that's not what we're here for. So we're going to disband every athletic program and get back to the job of education. Good luck to all you athletes who will never be able to attend a good college now (and maybe no college at all), it was fun but now it's over."

Because once that happens, you can't keep score anymore. MIT just wins on technology. Harvard just wins on absolutely everything else.

Sports allows schools (in particular, state schools) to compete with each other. There is no academic competition with Harvard or even with MIT. Harvard has all the endowment money, the plurality of the US Presidents, the plurality of the CEOs, the majority of the Supreme Court Justices, and all the entrepreneurs. Bill Gates quit Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg quit Harvard. In the meritocracy, Harvard just.... wins. Basically, everything. Harvard Medical, #1. Harvard MBA, #1. Harvard Law, #1. The end.

And this is the information age. From a purely technical standpoint, MIT just, wins. The highest paying, most prestigious technical employers only hire from MIT. Full stop.

Sports (well, winning sports) are what motivates the Ohio State/Alabama/USC/Notre Dame/etc alumni to bother to donate to their respective endowment funds. No sports, then no endowment. Leslie Wexner and his affiliation with Ohio State is the extreme exception, not the rule. For all the continuous donations, you need sports (specifically football and men's hoops.) The rest of the sports are just an expense the school must pay because of Title-IX legislation passed by a feminist congress back in 1972. Without sports, all the Harvard grads and MIT grads can just look at the rest of everyone else in the country and the diplomas they hang on their wall and say

ha ha, you weren't smart enough to get into Harvard. We will always be better than you in this entire lifetime.
you had to "settle" for LESS than Harvard

so, sports

[hedge]

God you're an idiot..

[innocentbystander]

Well, I didn't go to Harvard....

[hedge]

I wish you would go to Hellvard..

[hedge]

You do have a connection to Harvard, though. It rhymes with retard...

[innocentbystander]

Whatever you say hedge.

[Tree]

Wentz cut. Another coach fired along the way. Welcome to backupsville, champ.

[hedge]

"Wentz cut."

Cut a fart?

[Tree]

Where will Rodgers go? Still a top 2/3 qb along with Mahomes and Burrow, with apologies to Jackson and Herbert for not having good teams and playoff experience yet.

[Jungle Rat]

You're drunk if you still think that hippie is top 5.

[Tree]

You're even drunker than me if you think he's a hippie.

[Jungle Rat]

Impossible

[eCat]

looks like Mixon may be on the cut board